In the days since the close of the 2013 Festival de Cannes, all the buzz seems to be about the Palme d’Or winning film ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’ and it will go down in the history LGBTQ politics, especially as it won just a week after France legalized Gay Marriage.
Will it have a big legacy? Surely. Will it have the biggest legacy at Cannes. No. Very unlikely. What, you might ask, will then? The New “Cross Media Corner” at the festival; Cannes brand new program devoted to transmedia projects.
The “Cross Media Corner” has showcased several innovative projects in transmedia such as a multi-platform interactive interview with a former Guatemalan gang member titled Alma, A Tale of Violence, the location-based Parisian film-guide-app Cinemacity, multiple projects produced by the National Film Board of Canada, and the hit video game Pipe Line which was designed to both entertain and teach about the natural gas industry, just to name a few.
While these transmedia projects are all somewhat diverse in their form, they all share the same intrinsic qualities of blending multiple traditional mediums through new interactive technology, and are operating in ways previously impossible in traditional film. Furthermore, these projects are showcasing the future of film industry in these sense that they are bridging different foreign markets and audiences in both their subject matter and production. These projects came from all over the world, and the fact that Cannes, the most prestigious international film market and festival, has started a program devoted to these transmedia projects has only further legitimized their place as the future of the film industry.
Our CEO, Mahyad Tousi made an appearance on May 23rd as part of a roundtable along with Liz Rosenthal and Tishna Molla of Power to the Pixel to discuss how our award winning app Operation Ajax, based on the true events of the 1953 Iranian Coup, is a prime example of this transition to transmedia, and why this transition has become an inevitable phenomenon. The panelists examined how the app resembles the format of the traditional graphic novel, and how the incorporation of interactive technology has allowed it to expand on that format in new and innovative ways that feel totally natural and intuitive to the reader. As he explained in his fantastic speech at TEDxLBS, Mahyad showed that this is because transmedia is the logical extension of storytelling; these new interactive technologies such as sound and movement are merely derivative forms of the same mechanics that captivate in any narrative progression. They’re so captivating in fact, that the app has been able to cater itself to a new alternative educational format that can be used in the classroom in ways no traditional text can. It’s so effective in teaching, that both middle school and military classrooms have started to assign the app to their students.
Operation Ajax is truly an impressive feat of technology, but Canne’s “Cross Media Croner” showed us that it is just one of many such projects changing the future of film. So go ahead ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’, take your Palme d’Or, we’ll happily take the prize of making history instead.
